Bob Dylan's album covers sometimes just as powerful as his songs

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 3, 2009

Bob Dylan’s album covers have provided some iconic images over the years, whether it’s a photo of the singer or art he helps choose.

Bob Dylan’s album covers have provided some iconic images over the years, whether it’s a photo of the singer or art he helps choose.

Photo: BLOOMBERG NEWS

Bob Dylan's album covers sometimes just as powerful as his songs

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When Bob Dylan stares at you without a smile he means business. Bringing It All Back Home,Highway 61 Revisited,Blonde on Blonde— recorded and released between 1965 and 1966 — featured his serious stareson the covers of what are widely regarded as his most important albums. Even when the photo is out of focus, there is clarity to what he was doing musically. He didn’t really look dead ahead again with a straight face untilTime Out of Mindin 1997, which was when he stopped making lousy albums.

I first heard the serious straightforward stare/statement album theory around the time of his next album, 2001’s “Love and Theft.” As a moderate Dylanist, I thought it made some sense. So why the stare? Daniel Kramer, the photographer for Bringing It All Back Home,has one answer. “He’s looking at the camera because I sat him there and said, ‘Sit here and look at the camera.’ ”

Even with Dylan — whose mystique has long invited excessive analysis — it’s sometimes that simple. He just releasedTogether Through Life,his fourth very good album in a row. It features one of his most striking album covers: Acclaimed photographer Bruce Davidson shot the image of two lovers intertwined in the back of a car in the middle of a highway. The type design — which echoes the work of Nashville’s legendary Hatch Show Print — is by the marvelous Los Angeles graphic designer Coco Shinomiya. It stylishly reflects some themes of uncertainty and movement and commitment on the album. Dylan’s not staring at you, which might be because nine of the 10 songs are co-written with Robert Hunter.

Album covers — while they still exist — should say something about the music inside, much the same way the title does. Dylan is an interesting study because the tenor of his recordings was foreign compared to that of other musicians popular in the 1960s. Pop, British Invasion, psychedelic rock: He existed largely outside such subgenres, which was also reflected in his album art. When musicians were using bold colors, trippy typography and kaleidoscopic images for their ’60s album covers, Dylan used photos of himself dressed like a guy who lived alone in a cabin.

He was introduced earnestly, a round-faced folkie with the fisherman’s cap and wool-collared winter coat looking straight ahead on his self-titled debut (1962). He seems amused by the attention, struggling to stifle a smile. He’s underdressed for the season on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan a year later, smiling and locking arms with then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, scampering around New York’s Greenwich Village in February. Paul Till, who would provide the cover shot for Blood on the Tracks years later, calls it “a very cute shot, very sweet. But you look at it and think, man, that was a long time ago.”

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There were fewer issues of artist control that early in his career. Photographer Don Hunstein was employed by Columbia and told to shoot Dylan one afternoon to fill the label’s publicity files. “They knew he was a shooting star,” Hunstein says. He shot Dylan and Rotolo inside Dylan’s apartment and then urged them to move outside, where he snapped some close-ups and the sweet arm-in-arm shot that became the cover. “It’s different from his other covers,” Hunstein says. “I think because of Suze being there he felt good, and it showed.”

Bringing It All Back Home was Dylan’s first A-bomb, musically and visually. It was the first album he released without song titles littering the cover. It was also pioneering in its conceptual nature. Dylan sits in the center of a room holding a cat. His manager’s wife is in the background (the photo shoot was at her home). And there’s an array of cultural artifacts: a Time magazine with LBJ on the cover, a bunch of art and albums and a fallout shelter sign from the basement.

Kramer had heard the music and knew Dylan was doing something “special and separate from everything else that was going on. I wanted to show that.” He wanted to make a cover that was different not only from Dylan’s previous work but also from album covers to that point. “Most covers at that time were not conceptual,” he says.

The photographer designed a rig that allowed his camera to focus on Dylan at the center of the image while blurring the surroundings. “The world around him, the times, even music, were in flux, but I wanted him in the center with a certain amount of control.

“People hadn’t seen Dylan that way before. Up to that point he’d been in a little leather jacket with a guitar or a cap, a folk figure, a wayfarer. Suddenly he’s in an elegant setting, posing like a kind of royalty, which he’d kind of become.”

Kramer points out his subject “doesn’t like looking at cameras. It was not his favorite thing to do.” Dylan wasn’t alone. Of the numerous shots taken during the session, the one used for the cover is the only one in which the cat was looking at the camera. “Cats don’t take direction as well as human subjects,” he says.

Sometimes Dylan didn’t know he was being shot. Till was an audience member with a camera in Toronto in 1974 when he snapped a profile of Dylan performing. Till points out the show was loud and nothing at all like the introspective music that Dylan would include on Blood on the Tracks a year later. “That tour was very distant and not at all personal,” he says. “Big stadiums, big sound, very big, solid projected performances. There was none of that intimate introspection.”

But the photographer blew up a part of a negative and manipulated it, resulting in an iconic image that looks like a painting. He says he got Dylan’s office address from Who’s Who and sent a copy of the image.

Sunglasses block Dylan’s eyes in the photo. After Till’s treatment the eyes just look deeply shadowed, fitting for the bitter and brokenhearted music included on Blood. It seems prophetic, though Till prefers to call it “just fortuitous.”

Together Through Lifeis the second album in a row without a photo of Dylan — the first time that has happened since his religious trilogy of the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s also the first time sinceTime Out of Mind(1997) that Dylan hasn’t used a design by Geoff Gans.Another songwriter and friend of Gans’ told me that the designer faxed Dylan one of the photos for that album and Dylan preferred the fax to the actual photo, resulting in a mysterious and moody cover.

“I think Dylan was always very smart about the camera,” Kramer says.Time Out of Mindwas written before Dylan had a near-death experience. But the album was released after the brush with death. So the image could be a comment about fading away. Or maybe it’s a statement about technology: the old folk blues guy uncomfortable inside a fortress of technology.

Or maybe he just liked the blurry photo better.

Here are shorter comments about the rest of the covers over the past 47 years, excluding compilations, live albums and a couple of others:

The Times They Are a Changin’(1964): His first set of all original songs, and he seems serious about it. He looks gaunt like a bluesman, contemplative, and perhaps in a foul mood.

Another Side of Bob Dylan(1964):This oneappears to be his first joke. Dylan is blank-faced, his foot propped up, as though in flippancy about a gradual move away from traditional folk, an act that will cause consternation among people who have little more to care about than maintaining a folktatorship.

Highway 61 Revisited(1965): Another Daniel Kramer shot. Dylan looks directly at the camera again, but this time his head is tilted, almost in agitation. Kramer had Dylan’s road manager stand behind him. The effect is that of a guy surrounded by cameras and irked by it.

Blonde on Blonde(1966): An ambitious double album with a big gatefold close-up of a blurred Dylan staring intently from the cover, a stylish coat and scarf capped by his unruly hair. The stare is similar to the one that appeared on“Love and Theft”decades later.

John Wesley Harding(1967): He appears to be wearing hisBlonde on Blondejacket, but the seriousness is gone. He’s smirking and standing alongside two South Asian musicians and a stone-faced carpenter. The earthiness of the image (and the music on the album) contrasts with the psychedelia of the era. The light tone seems to reflect his desire to lose the “voice of a generation” tag.

Nashville Skyline(1969): When people flocked to Woodstock, Dylan fled to Nashville. He’s looking at the camera, but the cover features a big smile, and the first of his homages that I’m aware of: The tip of the hat, which would be aped by artists for years, was a nod toThe Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt, an album visible on the cover ofBringing It All Back Home. For what it’s worth, it was also the first time Dylan didn’t bother to shave for a cover.

Self-Portait(1970): The first time a cover hadn’t featured a photo of Dylan. Perhaps it’s a self-portrait, though if so, it’s of the short-haired, clean-shaven Dylan.

New Morning(1970): He’s staring ahead, but this is a warm come-hither photo snapped by Len Siegler of a seersucker-sporting Dylan in love. His gentlest cover.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid(1973): The first cover to feature no face at all, which makes sense: The middling album (with a couple of great songs) was a soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s film.

Planet Waves(1974): I’m skipping 1973’sDylan, which was a release more attributed to his label than to Dylan.Planet Wavesis the second time he painted a cover for his own album. There are three faces (unless a busted peace sign at the bottom is a fourth); all three are abstract enough that they could be Dylan. This one is persistently puzzling.

Desire(1976, bypassingThe Basement Tapes, which were released eight years after being recorded): Smiling in profile, practically in costume, which makes sense since the album has several external narratives. The image is another tip to a previous album cover, in this case John Phillips’John the Wolfking of L.A., released six years earlier. Why? No idea.

Street Legal(1978): He looks like he’s trying to dress for the era, a first. Peering down the sidewalk as though he wonders what’s approaching. Answer: a slump.

Slow Train Coming(1979): Its title hints at a resurrection, further suggested by the cover illustration of a train approaching even though the people aren’t yet ready for it. They’re still building the tracks, one guy swinging a pickax that — not coincidentally — looks like a cross.

Saved(1980): God’s hand (presumably) reaches down to a bunch of other hands in Tony Wright’s painting, which would later be replaced with a blurry concert photo that had nothing to do with the album.

Shot of Love(1981): A radiant Pop Arty illustration by artist Pearl Beach. Not sure what else there is to say. The cover implies a vitality absent in most of the music.

Infidels(1983): The face returns big and scruffy and obscured by saucer-size shades, suggesting “I’m back! But you still don’t know me.” Among his better middling albums.

Empire Burlesque(1985): The music sounds like something from theMiami Viceera; the cover looks like something from theMiami Viceera. It’s by Nick Egan, a British filmmaker who did a number of better album covers, including INXS’Kickand Dylan’sBiographbox set, which looked less dated than this one.

Knocked Out Loaded(1986): A sort of amusing painting of a woman about to break a vase over the head of a guy choking another guy. Not a well-received album and a case of the cover fitting the album title — but neither seeming to fit the songs. (See sidebar.)

Down in the Groove(1988): Profile shot with guitar and a light in his face that says nothing about the mostly forgettable music inside. As for the title, he was in a rut, not a groove.

Oh Mercy(1989): The cover is from a mural titled “Dancing Couple” by Washington, D.C., street artist Remerro Trotsky Williams. That the dancers seem to be convulsing creates an eerie tension reflected in some of the better songs on an uneven album.

Under the Red Sky(1990): The ominous title and desert setting on the cover are strangely incongruous with the glossy hit-and-mostly-miss music inside.

Good as I Been to You(1992): An album of old folk songs and cheap-looking cover. Dylan sports a bored expression and seems to be looking far away for inspiration. Worst of his covers? A sure contender.

World Gone Wrong(1993): More folk and blues covers but an artsier cover that seems to be set in a bistro for some reason.

Time Out of Mind(1997): Interesting cover with Dylan out of focus clutching an acoustic guitar and surrounded by recording gear. After a period of wandering, he seems to have refound his identity, which makes the blurred photo kind of funny.

“Love and Theft”(2001): The stare seems sincere, the mustache doesn’t. The photo is very light, which puts more emphasis on the type and the intriguing use of quotes, which could entail a big, long story involving a scholarly book about minstrelsy.

Modern Times(2006):Intriguing use of Taxi, New York Night, a 1947 photo by the late Ted Croner. It’s a gorgeous image that seems to apply to both the album title and the songs themselves. Designer Gans told Entertainment Weekly both he and Dylan were unaware that the photo had been used on the cover of an EP by alternative rock band Luna years earlier.